• AeonFelis@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Voyager 3 will stop working halfway to Mars because it’ll try to verify the subscription status with us-east-1 and get a timeout.

  • unphazed@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Google would be the worst partner for any space related work. We plan on launching in 4 years. Oh, Google says they redesigned it, oh, now it needs updates. 3 years, 11 mo later… Google cancelled the program, we need to find another partner.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      October 20st, 2023: NASA’s Voyager Team Focuses on Software Patch, Thrusters

      The team is also uploading a software patch to prevent the recurrence of a glitch that arose on Voyager 1 last year. Engineers resolved the glitch, and the patch is intended to prevent the issue from occurring again in Voyager 1 or arising in its twin, Voyager 2.

      Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have traveled more than 15 billion and 12 billion miles from Earth, respectively. At those distances, the patch instructions will take over 18 hours to travel to the spacecraft. Because of the spacecraft’s age and the communication lag time, there’s some risk the patch could overwrite essential code or have other unintended effects on the spacecraft. To reduce those risks, the team has spent months writing, reviewing, and checking the code. As an added safety precaution, Voyager 2 will receive the patch first and serve as a testbed for its twin. Voyager 1 is farther from Earth than any other spacecraft, making its data more valuable.

  • ameancow@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Voyager’s mission parameters and expectations have only decreased since 1977, it will never be required to run newer software or investigate new objects. It is winding down and is just sending back enough data that we can use our more powerful Earth-based computers to detect the most subtle changes to the cosmic medium.

    Meanwhile, we have a constantly accelerating global marketplace of new software and new ways of both working and playing games. If ya’ll were operating on a system designed to stay functional for 40+ years you would not like that system.

    All that said, we do have a pretty bad problem with bloatware and software/hardware companies colluding to leverage consumers to buy and upgrade phones and computers more than necessary.

    I just don’t think it’s a fair comparison if we were to get really pedantic and serious about a joke meme.

    • rarsamx@lemmy.ca
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      3 days ago

      It’s not only commercial software.

      We’ve come to expect more from our computers and as our processors gain more power we find ways to use it. I’m running things on a laptop that before would have required a workstation. I wanted to run an LLM on an old desktop, and 8GB RAM wasn’t enough.

      • BreakerSwitch@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        True, but one of the biggest things we’re using that power for recently is “why bother optimizing?” With splashes of “can we obtain any more data from the user?”

      • ameancow@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        The backache and frustration with the number 67 for existing already did that, but thank you for reminding me that we had a good Windows OS once.

  • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I wonder if any aliens ever ran into this, if they’d be like wow, this tech is so low, let’s not bother with who sent it.

    Or if they’d be like, it looks like it took 100 years to get here, let’s see what they did in 100 years.

  • melsaskca@lemmy.ca
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    3 days ago

    It was about that time when progress was abandoned for profit. We’ve been swirling down ever since.